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Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source solutions, has introduced a decision management platform and low-code development tool intended to simplify the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is the next generation of the company’s business rules management offering, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, and is designed to enable organizations to quickly build applications that automate business decisions.

“The notion of low-code development is less about eliminating code or cutting traditional programmers out of the application development process, and more about helping business and IT users to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently, and in a complementary manner,” said Mike Piech, vice president and general manager of middleware for Red Hat. “Ultimately, what low-code tools should offer - and what we have built with Red Hat Decision Manager - is not a platform geared toward one or the other, but rather a rich and tightly integrated feature set designed to provide a better user experience regardless of whether you are a business analyst or hard-core developer.”

The Fedora Marketing Team is continuing with the Fedora Podcast and we have a new episode out. This ongoing series will feature interviews and talks with people who make the Fedora community awesome. These folks work on new technologies found in Fedora. Or they produce the distribution itself. Some work on putting Fedora in the hands of users.

It was seven years ago that Mandriva 2011 switched to using RPM5 from RPM4, but now for the next OpenMandriva release they are transitioning back to using RPM4 and with that making use of Fedora's DNF.

We are happy to announce, that, as in previous years, we will present our amazing distribution at the Chemnitz Linux Days 2018 (Chemnitzer Linux Tage, CLT) on the 10th and 11th of March. This is one of the biggest OpenSource exhibitions in Germany. This year also a very special year, as it’s the 20th anniversary. We are happy to celebrate this anniversary together, as we have been part of Chemnitzer Linux Days many times before.

This year's Wine developers conference is happening a bit earlier in the year than usual. The date and venue were recently announced for WineConf 2018, which is also celebrating the Wine Project's 25th anniversary.

Before we get in to the roundup, here’s a huge thank-you to the Mageians who helped with all the password resets after our security problem reported last week. Everything is mostly sorted now, but please contact the forum or the discuss mailing list if you still need help.

Honestly, when I started eelo a few weeks ago, I thought that maybe it would catch the attention of a few hundreds people in my personal network, and be a cool “side-project” project for me. Nothing more…

But the Kickstarter campaign seems to actually catch a lot of attention. It completed its initial goal in 6 days and did 200% in 15 days. We’re getting more and more articles about eelo in the press, and more than 2600 people have registered at eelo.io.

What’s more interesting is that the incoming web traffic at eelo.io is coming from all over the world. So either eelo is addressing a “global niche”, or it really has the potential to become a game changer. And as concerns about data privacy are really growing, my bet is that we could actually become a game changer.

Warm good wishes for a happy, successful and peaceful New Year to all Mageians everywhere.

This last week of 2017, there have been loads of updates – check out the usual links to see where we’re at: Mageia Advisories, the Mageia AppDB, PkgSubmit to see the last 48 hours, and Bugzilla.

Although Mageia 5 is scheduled to reach the end of support on the last day of 2017, due to an unexpected surge in last minute updates being submitted for testing by the qa team, it may be several days into the new year before updates for Mageia 5 stop becoming available.

The original creator of Mandrake Linux (which evolved into Mandriva and subsequently Mageia and OpenMandriva), Gaël Duval, has decided to create a new fork of Android which is restricted to the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS); the new creation is called eelo.

The creator of Mandrake Linux runs a campaign for the open, free mobile operating system eelo on the crowd funding site Kickstarter right now.

Designed to break the dominance of Apple's and Google's walled systems, eelo is based on LineageOS but takes it a step further than that.

At its core, eelo is more than just an operating system as plans are underway to establish free, open and secure web services next to it. Services like email, cloud storage and online office tools are mentioned explicitly on the Kickstarter project page.

In 1998, I created Mandrake Linux, because I was both a Linux fan and didn’t like Windows on the desktop. It’s been a long time, and I’m very happy I’ve been one of the actors who contributed to make the Linux desktop possible, even though it didn’t completely succeed. Since then, the smartphone has emerged. And it’s now a “companion of life” for many of us. On my side, I’ve been using Apple iPhones exclusively, since 2007. The main reason behind this choice is that I like iOS. It covers my needs, it looks great and elegant, and I find it very intuitive to use.

In 1998, Gaël Duval created Mandrake Linux (also known as Mandriva Linux) for the obvious reasons like love for open source uneasiness while using Windows. In those years of late 1990s, many enthusiasts began their Linux journey with this easy-to-install and user-friendly Linux distro. Eventually, things went wrong between Duval and Mandriva management, and he was laid off by the company in March 2006.

These days he is busy with a new project named eelo mobile OS to breathe a new life into your smartphone. In recent past, we’ve reported ongoing smartphone OS efforts from Purism and postmarketOS, and Duval’s endeavor seems like a step in the similar direction.

For our Russian readers who are fans of the KDE desktop, ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 was released this week as one of the notable Russian Linux distributions that is aligned with a KDE desktop. ROSA Desktop Fresh continues offering both KDE 4 and KDE Plasma 5 desktop options.

While the distribution is called ROSA Desktop Fresh, not everything is fresh about its packages besides still having around KDE4. ROSA Desktop Fresh R10 is still sadly using the Mesa 17.1 release series. On the kernel front they are shipping Linux 4.9.60 which is an LTS release albeit still rather dated for desktop hardware support.

A long-standing KDE initiative that hasn't received as much attention as it deserves is KDE Connect for allowing KDE to interface with other devices -- namely smartphones -- for being able to display phone notifications on your desktop and more. A new KDE Plasmoid makes it easy now to send/receive SMS text messages.

Once you have it configured to use the correct device, you type in the phone number of the person you wish to send the message to in the first box (as below). Please note this needs to be the international dialling code (ie +44 for the UK, +353 for Ireland). Then type your message and click the Send button, it’s that simple!

Powered by the Linux 4.13.12 kernel, OpenMandriva Lx 3.03 is an enhancement to the previous OpenMandriva Lx 3 releases, adding major improvements to the boot process. The OS also uses the Mesa 17.2.3 graphics stack with S3TC support enabled, the X.Org Server 1.19.5 display server, and systemd 234 init system.

On the user-visible side of changes, OpenMandriva Lx 3.03 ships with the KDE Plasma 5.10.5 desktop environment and KDE Frameworks 5.39.0 software stack, along with the latest Firefox Quantum web browser compiled with LLVM/Clang 5.0.0 and Calamares 3.1.8 as default graphical installer.

In the blog announcement, the Mageia developer explains that the team decided to postpone the EOL (End-of-Life) for the Mageia 5 release, which was supposed to reach end of life on October 31, until New Year's Eve, because many Mageia 5 users haven't upgraded to Mageia 6.

Announced on July 16, 2017, Mageia 6 is the latest stable release of the GNU/Linux distribution, incorporating some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source applications, including the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, AppStream support, GRUB2 as default bootloader, a new Xfce Live edition, and much more.